The problem is that when I do a lookup against subdom.mydomain.co.uk its not getting an authoritive answer as it seems to be getting the SOA from the root/parent domain (mydomain.co.uk)

I've been doing a bit of googling and saw some suggestions of using glue records but was told by my provider that Nominet doesnt support them.

Ultimatly my end goal is to not change anything in mydomain.co.uk (except adding records pointing to subdomains) and have subdom.mydomain.co.uk getting A records from ns1.mydomain.co.uk and ns2.mydomain.co.uk

I would post the zone files but I dont have access to them.

Any help much appreciated!

Pete

bathory

11-04-2011 04:58 AM

Hi,

Unless it's a typo, you have a wrong SOA for your domain. It should be

Ultimatly my end goal is to not change anything in mydomain.co.uk (except adding records pointing to subdomains) and have subdom.mydomain.co.uk getting A records from ns1.mydomain.co.uk and ns2.mydomain.co.uk

If I can understand well what you are trying to do, you need to add an $ORIGIN for the subdomain(s) in the mydomain.co.uk zone file. If you don't have access there is no other way to do what you're trying to accomplish.
Anyway, the zone file for the TLD, should look like this:

mydomain.co.uk. 21600 IN A 3.3.3.3
www 21600 IN A 3.3.3.3
ns2 IN A 2.2.2.2
ns1 IN A 1.1.1.1

Basically we are trying to use DNS load balancers (they serve the A Records) for the subdom.mydomain.co.uk while keeping the DNS management for the mydomain.co.uk with the provider and their web GUI. Would this be why the SOA is ns1.provider.com?

While I dont have direct access to the files to change myself I can specify changes to the provider and they can add them for me (they told me what I wanted to do wasnt possible, hence the post here as I found it hard to believe)

So from my understanding of what you're saying the zone file should look like (excluding the query regarding the root SOA)-

mydomain.co.uk. 21600 IN A 3.3.3.3
www 21600 IN A 3.3.3.3
ns2 IN A 2.2.2.2
ns1 IN A 1.1.1.1

In the above zone file, the lines in bold are the same as if you use the $ORIGIN, so you don't need both. But it's good practice to keep the domain and the subdomain(s) that are to be managed by a different dns, separated. So better use:

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
1.isp2.co.uk. 86400 IN A 60.60.60.60
2.isp2.co.uk. 86400 IN A 60.60.60.61

Cheers folks

bathory

11-04-2011 04:17 PM

So, it works.
From the 2 dig outputs, ns1/2/5/6.provider.com are the authoritative nameservers for mydomain.co.uk and ns1/2.mydomain.co.uk are the authoritative nameservers for subdom.mydomain.co.uk.
Now you need to configure the zone file(s) in ns1/2.mydomain.co.uk to add the A RRs for www.subdom.mydomain.co.uk and so on.

Regards

Pete-L

11-07-2011 05:19 PM

@bathory

The A records are handled by the load balancers, would this say to you that they arent serving the correct records when ns1/2.mydomain.co.uk gets queried?

Best Regards,
Pete

bathory

11-08-2011 12:15 AM

Quote:

The A records are handled by the load balancers, would this say to you that they arent serving the correct records when ns1/2.mydomain.co.uk gets queried?

By load balancers, you mean ns1/2.mydomain.co.uk?
If so, then yes, they should answer authoritatively when queried for subdom.mydomain.co.uk and hosts in that subdomain. Try some queries using dig an see if you get the correct answers: